unhelpful

UK/ʌnˈhɛlpfəl/US/ʌnˈhɛlpfəl/

adjectiveB2+Rare in speech; mostly a word you read · #13,154 of 15,258neutral

Unhelpful means doing nothing to make things easier. An unhelpful reply, unhelpful attitude, frankly unhelpful.

It is a British understatement of some force, since calling a response unhelpful is a good deal ruder than it sounds. It marks something as making the situation worse rather than merely not better.

Definitions of unhelpful

1adjectiveunhelpfulDoing nothing to make things easier.B2+
“The staff at the station were rude and unhelpful when we asked about the delay.”

unhelpful is a quality.

Where it comes from

Middle English
helpful
English
helpful
English, today
unhelpful

From un- + helpful. helpful comes from Middle English helpful; equivalent to help + ful.

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA

Practise this word

unhelpful in the wild

The female lead, played by Shirley Ross is a local beauty queen who makes unhelpful comments about the islands.
Waikiki Wedding
However, site owners can block specific sitelinks if they consider them unhelpful.
Sitelink
John Blight's second patron, James Halliwell, was similarly unhelpful, never paying him for his vast labour in illustrating Halliwell's projected edition of William Shakespeare's Works.
John Thomas Blight
Cognitive therapy (CT) is a kind of psychotherapy that treats problematic behaviors and distressing emotional responses by identifying and correcting unhelpful and inaccurate patterns of thinking.
Cognitive therapy
Most minerals that are harder have an unhelpful white streak.
Streak (mineralogy)

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From Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. These sentences were written by other people about their own subjects; they are here to show the word at work, not as anybody’s opinion.

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